Hail and Well Met

One of the books that became a major influence on how I approach the Bible is The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter. A professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Alter sees the OT with the eyes of a literary critic, subjecting the biblical texts to the kind of critical analysis one might apply to the works of Shakespeare. The texts display literary artistry and are not simply cobbled together from various sources.

In chapter 3 of the book, Alter speaks of something I’ve written about in previous articles, how the same story gets told two or three times, sometimes with the same characters:

Three times a patriarch is driven by famine to a southern region where he pretends that his wife is his sister, narrowly avoids a violation of the conjugal bond by the local ruler, and is sent away with gifts. Twice Hagar flees into the wilderness from Sarah’s hostility and discovers a miraculous well and that story itself seems only a special variation of the recurrent story of bitter rivalry between a barren, favored wife and a fertile co-wife or concubine. That situation, in turn, suggests another oft-told tale in the Bible, of a woman long barren who is vouchsafed a divine promise of progeny, whether by God himself or through a divine messenger or oracle, and who then gives birth to a hero. (p. 49)

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear

Alter provides a modern-day example that particularly stuck with me over the years. Think of the gun-slinging hero in Westerns, able to draw and outshoot the bad guys before they can even pull their triggers. In a similar analogy I used way back when I began my blog five years ago, suppose that centuries from now, only a dozen Western movies have been preserved. In all but one, the hero has such a “hyperreflexive arm”. In the one exception, the hero has a withered arm and has taught himself to shoot from a rifle slung over his back.

Alter imagines that, having studied the surviving samples of 20^th-century Western cinema, future scholars might hypothesize these are all derivations of one original story of a hero with lightning reflexes. The oddball story of the rifleman with a withered arm would be a variant from a different source tradition.

Unlike these imaginary scholars of Western cinema studies, we who have seen untold number of Westerns from the Lone Ranger to Matt Dillon know that the image of the quick-on-the-draw gunfighter is a convention in that genre. When you have a major departure from the convention, the uniqueness tells you something about the character or story. In this case, it might be the hero’s determination to overcome a physical handicap or the rifle provides some advantage over the typical six-shooter.

Alter calls these conventions “type-scenes” and identifies several in the Bible: “the annunciation … of the birth of the hero to his barren mother; the encounter with the future betrothed at a well; the epiphany in the field; the initiatory trial; danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other form of sustenance; the testament of the dying hero” (p. 51).

Betrothal type-scenes

Alter spends the rest of the chapter discussing a particular convention he calls the “betrothal type-scene” in which the hero of the story meets his future bride at a well in a foreign land. He draws water for the “girl” (how she is usually referenced) who then rushes home bringing news of the stranger. The stranger is invited to a meal, after which the betrothal between the stranger and the girl is finalized. 

I’ll skip over the first betrothal type-scene in Genesis for now and return to it later. In the second example (Gen 29:1-20), Jacob, escaping from his brother’s wrath, arrives at a well in a foreign land. Rachel arrives to water her flock but a large stone covers the well’s mouth. Jacob moves the massive stone and waters her flock. After Jacob informs Rachel that he is her kinsman, she runs to tell her father, Laban. The closed well is a metaphor for Rachel’s closed womb and Jacob’s labor in moving the stone foreshadows the various obstacles he will need to overcome in securing his bride and making his fortune. Stones also feature prominently in the Jacob cycle of stories.

The third example comes from Exodus (2:15b-21) where Moses, escaping from Pharaoh’s wrath in Egypt, arrives by a well in Midian. Zipporah and her six sisters come to water their flock but are driven off from the well by shepherds. Faced not just with an inanimate obstacle but with enemies, Moses drives off the hostile shepherds and waters the flock of Zipporah and her sisters. How Moses rises to the challenge is entirely appropriate for someone who has killed an Egyptian taskmaster, will later face off with Pharaoh to liberate his people, and become Israel’s military commander for the next forty years. That the tale is briefly told is typical of how the Torah doesn’t dwell on Moses’ personal life.

Elizarus and Rebekah at the Well (1670s) byJohann Carl Loth. The name of Abraham's oldest and most-trusted servant isn't given in Gen 24, but earlier in Gen 15:2 Abram laments that without a son, "Eliezer of Damascus" will be his heir.

Rebekah takes charge

Now that we have reviewed a couple of examples, let’s return to the first betrothal type-scene (Gen 24:10-61) and see how it differs from the simpler stories we just examined.

The main difference is that it is Abraham’s servant – instead of Isaac – who travels to the foreign land. The servant showers Rebekah with gifts that her brother is quick to notice. This is revealing of Laban’s grasping nature and why he will later become one of Jacob’s obstacles.

Alter says this is the only example in the Bible of a surrogate meeting the future bride. This is fitting because Isaac is a passive and shadowy figure in Genesis. We last saw him about to be sacrificed at God’s request. He’s not mentioned again until this betrothal episode, and then he only appears at the end to take Rebekah as his wife. Isaac appears in Gen 26 but these are recycled stories (wife-sister, treaty with Abimelech, dispute over wells, and origin of the name of Beersheba) from the Abraham cycle. Isaac plays a part in Gen 27 in which Jacob steals his blessing from Esau, but by then Isaac is old and blind.

The other major departure is that Rebekah draws water for the stranger (= the servant) instead of the other way around. The number of actions (11 verbs in the four verses of vv. 16-20) Rebekah takes (drawing water, filling her jar, pouring, giving drink, etc.) are emblematic of the dominant role she later plays (taking, cooking, dressing, giving) in the story of securing the blessing for her favored son, Jacob (Gen 27). As the most-controlling of all the matriarchs, it is appropriate that she dominates her betrothal scene.

Jesus the Bridegroom

Being a professor of Hebrew literature, Robert Alter limits his analysis to the OT. But if we include the NT, we see something that looks like a betrothal type-scene in the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:1-42. Once again we have a stranger (Jesus) in a foreign land (Samaria) who is sitting beside Jacob’s well about noon when a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water. A conversation ensues, after which the woman leaves her water jar behind and returns to the city to inform its citizens of the stranger she just met. Moved by her testimony, they invite Jesus to stay with them for a couple of days.

A major difference in this version is that, instead of a maiden, we have a five-times married woman. There is no actual exchange of water, although the subject of water is the lynchpin of the dialogue that ensues in which Jesus contrasts the stagnant water of the well with his living water (the gift he has to offer). The episode ends not with a betrothal contract but with the townsfolk coming to believe in Jesus.

Understanding the literary conventions puts the modern reader of the Bible in the mind of the originally intended audience. When we watch a Western and see the hero face off with the bad guy on a dusty street in front of a saloon, we expect a shootout. Similarly, when the ancient audience saw the hero arrive at a well in a foreign land, they expected he would meet his future wife there. Knowing how the scene is supposed to play out, the audience – modern or ancient – revels in any twists from the standard convention. As the saying goes, “God is in the details.”

The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene

About a year ago I read a movie review of Mary Magdalene, directed by Garth Davis (Lion). I was busy that weekend but thought I’d check it out the following weekend. After a one-week run at theaters in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, the closest theater still showing it was in San Antonio. A five-hour road trip was not in cards, so I resolved to catch it on cable and finally had that opportunity when it recently appeared on Showtime.

My impressions were that it is an amazingly quiet movie, hushed tones, very understated. As would be expected of a movie focused on a female character, it is a feminist movie in that Mary defies cultural rules imposed on women and is treated as an equal to the male disciples. The movie is a little revisionist because Mary is not presented as a reformed prostitute (how she is typically portrayed in popular media) or the wife of Jesus (a major theme of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code). But mostly the movie is a re-envisioning of the gospel story as seen through the eyes of one of Jesus’ female disciples.

What do we know about Mary Magdalene?

The NT sources don’t tell us a whole lot about Mary Magdalene:

• Had seven demons driven from her (Lk 8:2)
• Among the women who travelled with Jesus and financially supported his ministry (Lk 8:1-3)
• Among the women who witnessed the crucifixion (Mt 27:55f; Mk 15:40f; Jn 19:25)
• Went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and found the tomb empty (Mt 28:1-8; Mk 16:1-8; Lk 24:1-11; Jn 20:1-3)
• Witnessed the risen Jesus and told the apostles about it (Mt 28:9-10; Jn 20:14-18) 

Obviously, filling out a 2-hour movie will require some creative license.

While implied in her name, the NT does not explicitly state Mary comes from the city of Magdala in Galilee. This was a fairly large city of some 40,000 people, most of them Gentile, and was a main fishing and export center in the region.

Also, you will note that nowhere in the gospels is Mary referred to as a prostitute. That was a later invention of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), conflating stories of the sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears (Lk 7:36-50) and Mary of Bethany who anointed his feet with perfume (Jn 12:1-8).

Outside the NT, Mary appears prominently in some Gnostic gospels. In these, she symbolizes the Gnostic church and is opposed by Peter who represents the apostolic church. As one whom Jesus loved more than any other, she was given secret knowledge directly by Jesus that was not handed down through the apostles.

Poster from the 2018 UK release of Mary Magdalene

The portrait of Mary in Mary Magdalene

The movie begins with Mary (Rooney Mara) working hard in the family’s fishing business and unhappy with the idea of an arranged marriage to a local widower. Her strong opposition to the union convinces her family she has a demon. After traditional exorcisms almost kill her, one of her brothers calls in Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix), who happens to be passing through town, to heal her. After a brief chat with Mary, Jesus declares, “There are no demons here.”

Mary is captivated by Jesus’ preaching and healings. She abandons her family to be baptized by him and becomes his first female disciple. When she tells Jesus that the women of Magdala were too afraid to be baptized by the male disciples, Jesus begins to preach to women as well and Mary baptizes the women who come forward to follow Jesus.

When Mary hears Jesus speak of the kingdom of God, she instinctively understands it is something we bring about through our actions while the male disciples believe that Jesus will overthrow Roman domination in order to bring about a new world. Jesus pairs up Mary with Simon Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and sends them out to preach. They arrive in a village in Samaria where the Romans have massacred most of the populace. Peter is ready to leave the starving survivors to their fate but Mary cares for them in their dying moments and Peter realizes the power of mercy.

After Jesus initiates a riot in the Temple, all the male disciples expect Jesus will inaugurate a revolt against the Romans. But when Jesus fails to carry forward the expected revolution, Judas (Tahar Rahm) tries to force his hand with disastrous consequences.

Mary holds a lonely vigil outside Jesus’ tomb and, in the morning speaks to the risen Jesus. She tells the male disciples that Jesus appeared to her and told her the kingdom they all worked for is here already, within us. While Peter believes she had an experience of the risen Lord, he sees it as a sign that Jesus will return some day, bringing the true kingdom. Peter cannot accept that Jesus chose her as the recipient of a “special message” when all the men were chosen to build the one church, with one message. Rejected by the men, Mary will not remain and stay silent, so she goes off on her own.

How does the movie compare to what we know about Mary?

Portrayed as a poor fisher woman, Mary is not a woman of means capable of providing for Jesus and his disciples out of her own resources. Wealthy women did exist in that time. For an example of this, I think of Paul’s first known Christian convert in Europe, Lydia of Thyatira (Acts 16:11-15), a financially independent woman with a business, house, servants, and so on. A large cosmopolitan city like Magdala would have provided more opportunities for a Jewish businesswoman than the small village depicted in the film.

The movie gives short shrift to Mary’s role in Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Knocked out at Jesus’ arrest, she arrives in time to see him carrying his cross, but is too overwhelmed with grief to follow. She eventually makes it to the foot of the cross as Jesus breathes his last and helps with the burial. Given these are the moments when Mary first appears in the gospels, this choice of the writers or director here is rather surprising. Perhaps they felt this was well-trod ground quite sufficiently covered in other movies about Jesus?

There is a Gnostic flavor to Mary’s claim to the male disciples that she received a special revelation from the risen Jesus, but the message she presents in the movie is a completely orthodox one. We, the audience, should know that in time Peter and the others will receive their own vision of the risen Lord and will eventually come around to understand the gospel as Mary presents it to them. But for the less biblically literate among us, the movie’s presentation could be seen as elevating Mary at the expense of the male disciples.

The movie ends with a postscript stating that in 2016, the Vatican formally identified Mary of Magdala as “apostle of the apostles”. This is a reference to a proclamation that elevated her July 22 memorial day to that of feast day, the same as the other apostles in the Church calendar.

In closing, I offer the opening prayer for the Feast Day of St. Mary Magdalene:

In the garden He appeared to Mary Magdalene, who loved him in life, who witnessed his death on the cross, who sought him as he lay in the tomb, who was the first to adore him when he rose from the dead, and whose apostolic duty was honored by the apostles so that the good news of life might reach the ends of the earth.

Abraham Unbound

In the Jewish tradition, Genesis 22:1-19 is referred to as the Akedah (ah-kay-DAH), or “binding” of Isaac. Christians will usually refer to it as the sacrifice of Isaac or even the testing of Abraham.

In this powerful story, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac as a burnt offering. Along with servants, they travel three days from Beersheba to the land of Moriah, the place of sacrifice. At the moment Abraham is ready to plunge a knife into Isaac, an angel calls out to him to stay his hand and a ram caught by its horns in a nearby thicket is substituted for Isaac. Jews remember this story on Rosh Hashanah when the ram’s horn (shofar) is blown. The shofar represents the ram substituted for Isaac and reminds God of his promise to bestow blessings upon Abraham and his descendants.

Christians view the story as a foreshadowing of the Passion narratives. Isaac is a precursor to Christ, the beloved Son offered as a sacrifice by the Father. The story was allegorized: Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice just as Jesus carried his cross, the journey to Moriah took three days and Jesus spent three days in the tomb, etc. In this accounting, Jesus was the perfect sacrifice because he actually suffered and died, whereas Isaac was released and a ram substituted.

The Land or Hill of Moriah?

Where is the place of sacrifice, “the land of Moriah”? Moriah is only mentioned in one other place in the Bible. In 2 Chr 3:1, Solomon built the Temple on “Mount Moriah”. The same verse identifies Mount Moriah as the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite (called Araunah the Jebusite in 2 Sam 24). Connecting these two references to “Moriah”, Jewish tradition saw the sacrifice of Isaac as a precursor of all the sacrifices to come later once the Temple was built.

Scholars are dubious that the two references to “Moriah” identify the same place. Gen 22 refers to a general area – the “land of Moriah” – but Chronicles refers to a specific hill called “Mount Moriah” which became known as the Temple Mount. Furthermore, Jerusalem is in a wooded area and it would have been unnecessary to load firewood on Isaac’s back since it could be acquired on-site.

There are two theories to explain the mismatch. The first theory is that the reference to the land of Moriah in Gen 22 was original and the Chronicler appropriated the name to associate the Temple Mount with the site of Isaac’s aborted sacrifice. But if this were the case, one suspects that the Chronicler would have made the connection more obvious. The second theory is that the Temple Mount was originally called Mount Moriah and the actual location in Gen 22 was suppressed and replaced with the name Moriah to link Abraham with the future site of the temple. This theory appears more likely to me.

Sacrifice of Isaac (1635) by Rembrandt (1606-1669) captures the dramatic moment when an angel stays Abraham’s hand. Note how Abraham’s left hand covers Isaac’s face and the look of amazement on Abraham’s face bordering on madness.

Would God Order the Sacrifice of Isaac?

The traditional understanding of the Akedah is that God never intended for Abraham to slaughter Isaac but was testing his faith. By trusting in God and not withholding his son, Abraham demonstrated his fear of God. Abraham is praised for being prepared to do whatever God asks, even at great personal cost. Some interpreters take it further and claim the story is a polemic against child sacrifice: God is demonstrating to Abraham that he will never ask a parent to murder their own child as an offering.

I don’t agree that the narrative is intended as a condemnation of the idea of child sacrifice. Even if God never intended for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, when asked to do it Abraham didn’t argue with God over the justice of killing an innocent the way he did when told about the impending destruction of Sodom. Any interpretation of Abraham’s actions needs to begin with the understanding that a deity’s demand for a child sacrifice was not an absurd or unusual request in ancient times. It is not surprising that Abraham accepted God’s command without question.

Certainly, from our vantage point, it seems unusually cruel for God to put Abraham through the mental anguish of preparing to sacrifice his own son, only to stop him at the last moment. But the biblical authors didn’t think in those terms. If they weren’t bothered by physical torture (see the instruction to Hagar to return to beatings at the hand of Sarah), the idea of psychological torture certainly wouldn’t have crossed their minds.

Divine Intervention?

Some commentators have suggested that, in the original telling of the story, Abraham completed his sacrifice of Isaac. They point to v. 19 which reads that Abraham – and not Abraham and Isaac – returned to his servants and they then journeyed home to Beersheba. Could this be a clue to how the original story went? According to this theory, later editors subsequently covered this up by the introduction of the angelic messenger who stayed Abraham’s hand in vv. 11-12. Evidence these verses might be a later addition is how they refer to “the angel of YHWH” while the rest of the narrative (except for v. 14 which might be another addition) uses God (= Elohim) as the name of the deity. The ram caught in the thicket in v. 13 would also have been invented as a replacement for Isaac’s aborted sacrifice.

The main problem I have with this theory is that Isaac would then be dead. What happens to the promise then? As we have seen, up to this point the promise of land and descendants to inherit the land are major running themes in the Abraham cycle. Praising Abraham for sacrificing his son while promising to make his offspring as numerous as the stars would really be rubbing salt in the wound. Killing off Isaac would necessitate the introduction of a new heir to fulfill the promise.

A third interpretation keeps the ram as part of the original story but rejects the idea Abraham completed the sacrifice. Following the logic above, YHWH’s messenger in vv. 11-12 is still considered a later interpolation. The text would then have flowed from v. 10 to v. 13: “Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son, but then he looked up and saw a ram…and offered it up instead of his son.” If this preserves the original narrative, then Abraham would have considered the trapped ram a sign that God wanted him to sacrifice it instead of his son. Later redactors, possibly bothered by the idea that Abraham would disobey a divine order, introduced YHWH’s messenger to provide divine sanction for the substitution.

Troubling Questions for Today

What difference does it make how we understand the Akedah? I’ll answer that with a question: If Abraham had completed the sacrifice of Isaac, would he still be considered the exemplar of a righteous man, the father of faith? After all, he was just following orders. Orders from God, in this case. Aren’t we supposed to follow the divine will, not our own?

This train of thought is not assuaged by the intervention of YHWH’s messenger because that still implies Abraham was ready to kill Isaac following God’s mandate until he was stopped in the act. Yes, God stayed his hand once Abraham had proved that he was prepared to go through with the sacrifice. But is Abraham a righteous man simply because he was stopped a moment before slaughtering his own innocent son? 

It is only in the scenario where there was no divine messenger do we have some glimmer that maybe Abraham was looking for a way out of his predicament, that he wasn’t really fully prepared to slaughter his son. In this scenario, we could consider Abraham to be a human being with parental affections similar to our own and not a mindless robot carrying out divine instructions. A man who, in the final analysis, chose the life of his son over blindly following the dictates of what he perceived to be God’s will is someone we might find worthy of emulating today.